This chapter draws on Frantz Fanon’s concept of the zone of nonbeing to argue for a deeper engagement with the lived experiences and ontological realities of colonized and racialized subjects in higher education. It applies Fanon’s insights to the affective and epistemic infrastructures of higher education institutions, examining how visibility, audibility, and legitimacy are unevenly distributed across academic spaces. The chapter contends that decolonization requires the development of new political concepts grounded in lived experience, historical struggle, and claims to dignity, rather than reliance on abstract theorization or essentialist identities. By resisting both reductive positionality and the reproduction of colonial logics through fixed categories, the chapter foregrounds anticolonial thought as a site of conceptual and political innovation. It argues that politically grounded conceptual work can revitalize decolonization efforts and open new horizons for higher education by reframing decolonization as an ontological and political project attuned to struggle, relation, and transformation.